Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
When Was Wales? Might as well ask why is Wales? Because that’s where the sheep are? Because that’s where it rains all the time? Because that’s where Welsh is spoken?
Look at the two names of this twice-spoken-for land. ‘Wales’ comes from an old Saxon word meaning something like Place of the Romanized Foreigners. It’s an audacious etymology: around the fifth century AD Saxon invaders moved into Britain and called the inhabitants foreigners. They subdued most of the southern half of the island, and what they couldn’t they called Wales. The word Cymru – the Welsh name for Wales – was born around the year 580 in reaction to these events. The unconquered people who spoke Brythonic, the ancestor to Welsh as Anglo-Saxon is to English, called their bit of high, rough, western Britain Cymru, or the Home of Fellow Countrymen (the word Cymry means Welshmen). As late as the 1180s, Gerald of Wales – ironically writing in Latin – noted, ‘To this day our country continues to be called Wales and our people Welsh, but these are barbarous terms.’
Surely Cymru and Wales are two different places. They must be, for the languages that contain them, Welsh and English, hold such vastly different memories. In Wales the shorn flanks of the great, catapulting hills and the mottled pasturelands of the valleys are a consolation prize; in Cymru they’re home. To be a traveller in this place I love, which is all I claim to be – I’m hardly a linguist, I’m not even good at languages – it’s not enough to be led by the senses as I was in my tourist guise in Brazil. I want to break through the space – time continuum too, the way Tom did on his computer in New York, and travel into Wales’s past, its humour, its spirit, as well as its landscape. The only way I can think to do that, to get beyond Wales into Cymru, is to have a command of the Welsh language and the memories it holds within it.
Cue back to the god of Irony. To accomplish this, for me, the language coward, means leaving the geographic country behind in search of its invisible, verbal progeny in Europe, Asia and South America. Only by travelling everywhere but Wales can I hope to find my way to Cymru.
Equally ironic, however, is the fact that the Welsh language is in no way mine to have. There simply is no verb meaning ‘to have’, in the sense of ‘to possess’, in Welsh. Plane tickets, maps, languages even, are only ‘with you’, as if by their consent, implying that they, like much of the isle of Britain, are perhaps once and future possessions to be taken away at a moment’s notice. To say ‘I have language’ is to mean, ‘There is language with me’ – Mae iaith gyda fi. This pattern of having things ‘with you’ seems to me a grammar built on loss and impermanence, the linguistic heritage of the defeated. English, by comparison, is supremely confident in its sense of possession.
Which one will I use, I wonder uneasily, as Marguerite and I hoist our packs and slip on our sensible German walking shoes and begin searching the world for Cymru?
CYMRU (WALES)
Siarad to Speak
I have laryngitis. Not the low, burnt-sugar kind that people find so sexy, but the hissy, rasping kind that sounds as if I’ve been garrotted and just escaped with my life. No one wants to hear me talk for long in any language, which is a blessing.
We’ve decided to begin the trip in Wales after all, in hopes of tapping the Welsh diaspora at its source, which is doubtless the cause of my illness; any minute now someone’s bound to speak to me in Welsh, and since that’s precisely the point of this book it would behove me to respond in kind. I blow an inward kiss to my vocal cords.
It happens in the post office.
Tim Evans, the clerk at the far window, spies me and does a slow-motion doubletake. His eyes go as round as his face and blink in mock horror. I bat my lids a few times. This game has been going on since 1984. When my turn comes Tim’s window is free, and I steel myself for the inevitable.
‘Wel, wel’ – his voice is clear and sweet as jelly and rippling with amusement – ‘sut mae, ’te?’ Relief. He’s leading with a simple howdy-do that doubles as a tease and a welcome back.
‘Da iawn, diolch. A sut dych chi?’ I lie that I’m fine and inquire about him, exaggerating the ‘chi’ to show that I, too, consider this Welsh exchange a game between old friends. So far the pleasantries are a breeze, though mine sounds like a cat being strangled under a pillow.
Tim launches his eyebrows. ‘Laryngitis?’
I nod and explain in embryonic Welsh that I’m in Lampeter to do research for my book. Before he can reply I switch to English and hiss, ‘And to practise Welsh, of course. After my throat gets better. And I need to send these postcards.’
‘Psychosomatic, then, is it?’ He plays the syllables of ‘psychosomatic’ like valves on a trumpet: up, down, up, down, up. Tim and I go back to my master’s degree days, when I slipped into the unfortunate habit of mailing letters without stamps. That and my American accent earned me a high profile in the post office, as did the fact that I kept coming back. Most students leave Lampeter for good after graduation; not only did I return, I returned often, and from America. That was counted as odd indeed. After each two- or three-year interval I’d walk into the Swyddfa’r Post, as it’s known in this Welsh-speaking market town, and Tim would greet me with, ‘So, back again, are you?’ or, louder, playing to the populace, ‘Well, if it isn’t the crazy American.’ But since my intensive Welsh course in the summer of 1992, held across the street at the College, we try to speak in Cymraeg. In very short sentences. For very short intervals.
‘I want to make you a deal,’ I propose.
The eyebrows rise again.
‘I’ll buy you lunch if you’ll speak to me exclusively in Welsh for at least an hour.’ This is a bold move, as we’ve never met outside the post office before.
Tim is a big man, Pavarotti-size at least. And he’s a tenor as well, with two albums out on which he sings almost exclusively in Welsh. I figure food is a strong temptation.
‘An offer I can’t refuse, I see.’ He smiles and his features bed down on a cushion of dimples. We agree on a date for next week.
I’m procrastinating, I know, but hey, I’m sick.
Tim Evans is one of only a handful of townspeople I know in Lampeter, which is odd considering I’ve spent at least twenty-eight months of my life here. By ‘here’ I mean any one of the three Lampeters: the Town, the College – formerly St David’s University College, now the University of Wales, Lampeter – or the Concept. This last, when referred to with equal parts vexation, perplexity and grudging affection by an inhabitant of either of the former, usually means something like the gulf that exists between them.
Lampeter the town is primarily Welsh-speaking, and therefore officially Llanbedr Pont Steffan (six syllables, which together beat out the Church of St Peter at Stephen’s Bridge); the College is essentially English-speaking but for the Welsh Department. The town, with its two new traffic lights and three main streets (two of which describe the upper and lower ends of the same trajectory), is a regional hub of around two thousand people. One of the college porters once confessed to me that his wife, a local farm girl now in her sixties, has never gotten over moving to town three years ago. City folk, she claims, just aren’t as friendly. The College, meanwhile, thrives like anaerobic bacteria on its sense of deprivation. It was founded in 1823 to keep young Welsh lads bound for the Anglican church out of reach of Oxford’s corrupting pleasures. Today, however, most of its staff and students are English expatriates, who gather together as on a deserted island and yearn in maudlin drunkenness for Thai food and foreign films.
These disparities are contained within a simple geography. To the eye Lampeter is plain. The nose is a more reliable guide to its charms: the acrid shiver of coal smoke on damp mornings; an oily stench outside Jones’s